College football Week 1: SEC Network starts strong

The opening week of the college football season is here, and it extends six days — Georgia State got special permission to start Wednesday because of conflicts at the Georgia Dome — with a few strong matchups.

The fledgling SEC Network has for its first-ever live college football telecast a matchup of top-25 teams when No. 21 Texas A&M visits No. 9 South Carolina. The other two top-25 matchups are on ESPN: No. 12 Clemson at No. 16 Georgia (5:30 p.m.), and No. 14 Wisconsin vs. No. 13 LSU at Houston (9 p.m.).

The week ends with a mediocre Monday night matchup between unranked Miami (Fla.) and Louisville, although the game will produce a strong rating because the NFL hasn’t started its regular season.

As of now the Syracuse opener Friday night against Villanova is available on ESPN3.com only. We are trying to find out if Time Warner may offer the game, which it has with some previous ESPN3 telecasts.

The schedule (all times Eastern; this week’s Associated Press rankings in boldface):

A warning to any Dish Network customers: they are going to black out the four college football games on FS1 this week/weekend. Apparently Fox is asking for more money for those games than what Dish already pays for the channel itself. Other programming will not be blacked out, according to what I have read.